These documentaries are a time-lapse study of human life. They are a gift.

The story line is not what carries this picture. Pomeranc carries it, with his gentleness, taciturnity and wise eyes. Whether throwing an easy match just to see what will happen if he loses, or looking infinitely sad and worldly as he contemplates the folly of a narrow-focus opponent, Pomeranc makes the linking of a moral intelligence to a chess intelligence the most exhilarating and touching sports combo at the movies this year. [11 Aug 1993, p.29]

This is a small, compassionate gem of a movie, one that’s rooted in details of people and place but that keeps opening up onto the universal.

Killers of the Flower Moon is flawed, but still worth seeing. The film’s final scene, which will surely be divisive, is perhaps the best coda Scorsese’s ever shot and features his most intriguing cameo appearance. It’s a gutsy way to tie up all the film’s loose ends — proof that even this far in his career, he still has a few new tricks up his sleeve.

In a sense, there can be nothing ordinary about such an extraordinary place. Furthermore, Wiseman’s special gift as a filmmaker has been to show how searching attention reveals that there really is no such thing as ordinariness.

The sight is magical and heartbreaking in equal measure. Look, the movie says: Where so many would fall, a man walks on air.

Sensual, funny, and moving film.

Elle may be the purest distillation of his worldview yet, and it’s a terrifying thrill.

There’s nothing static about Still Walking.’ The presence of three kids sees to that, as does the eloquence of Kore-eda’s framing and compositions.

There are moments -- just a few of them -- when the film . . . does feel a bit like work, a relentless civics lesson about the storm and its still-unfolding aftermath.

A comic put-on of awe-inspiring crudity and death-defying satire and by a long shot the funniest film of the year. It is "Jackass" with a brain and Mark Twain with full frontal male nudity.

Minari is as American as apple pie and kimchi, which is to say it’s what America is all about.

Like her heroine, Wang straddles the fence and argues from either side of it; like her, the movie is profoundly Chinese-American, speaking to both audiences and able to be enjoyed by both.

There is nothing I dislike more than a movie that demands that you love an obnoxious, insufferable protagonist. Marty Supreme is not only one of the worst examples of this phenomenon, it’s also one of the worst movies of the year.

It’s a gentle epic, based on a 10th-century Japanese folk tale, that uses pencils, ink, and impressionistic washes of color to convey a glowing visual otherworld, one that stands in contrast both to Takahata’s earlier work and the hard-edged lines and bright tones of much anime.

Ferguson's film is a clear-sighted counterpoint to the former secretary of defense's impression. As the title suggests, it's a seemingly infinite mess.

It is first and foremost a moral tale, and an overpowering one.

It sounds like the old unstoppable-force-meets-immovable-object trick. Ramin Bahrani's Goodbye Solo has the trappings of such a story, but, mercifully, none of the follow-through.

Gunda ― which doubles as the name of the movie and the name of the pig ― is as close as we may ever come to experiencing the world as animals do, specifically the animals that become our food.

Campion’s best-known films (the remarkable The Piano, 1993; The Portrait of a Lady, 1996) are not just set in the past but summon it up with a rare capacity to make viewers feel a sort of displacement from the present. She does that here, too.

What's most unusual about the original 24 years later, though, is its elegant minimalism.

Kogonada establishes a meditative tone and rhythm as his compositions parallel the building’s pleasing symmetries.

Michael Hazanavicius's love letter to classic cinema isn't perfect but it's close enough to make just about anyone who sees it ridiculously happy - and that includes children and grown-ups who have never come across a silent film.

The final shots are both majestic and damning, and they lift the film with a kind of gentle contempt into a surrealism that makes an awful kind of sense, the world in its lushness swallowing Zama as it will swallow us all. Some movies unfold as dreams; Zama dances us playfully toward the edge of nightmare and then asks us to open our eyes.

The film shifts back and forth in time. It works like memory that way, but the memories are Johnson’s, not the viewer’s, which makes the absence of some discernible organizing principle a real drawback.

If you’ve ever helped shepherd a parent or a grandparent in their final years, you may be better equipped to handle this movie’s gallows humor and to appreciate the care with which it separates the contradictory emotions felt by Kirsten and all grown children.

A film noir? A backstage musical? A whodunit? A comedy? In truth, it's all of the above -- plus a kinky love story, an absorbing melodrama, and a mordantly jaded snapshot of postwar Paris -- and all of them are wonderful.

As casually insensitive and careless as you might expect from a film of this era, but it's also surprisingly crafty about finding ways to incite discussion

Told from the perspective of its 9-year old protagonist, Cáit (Catherine Clinch), writer-director Colm Bairéad’s adaptation of Claire Keegan’s 2010 novella, “Foster” is as beautiful as it is devastating.

Eloquent, bloody, and daringly simple.

It takes a few minutes to catch on, and it would be indiscrete to specify what it is, but once you figure out what’s really strange about it you have entered the solipsistic prison of a tormented mind.

Richly allusive and eloquently stylized.

What has aged well in Diva is the grave beauty of that aria and the wry, painterly camera shots - you should see the new print for the colors alone - conceived by Beineix but executed by the great French cinematographer Philippe Rousselot. They're enough to tide us over and maybe convince the kids that hip date movies existed back when their parents and dinosaurs roamed the earth.

An innovative hybrid of documentary, staged reading, fictional feature, and confessional, The Arbor defies categorization not merely for art's sake - although its artistry is without question - but because conventional forms seem inadequate for such a harrowing story.

Languorous and enigmatic, “Long Day’s Journey” is the very definition of art cinema, and it will baffle and possibly enrage casual filmgoers expecting such niceties as plot. It is a movie not to be followed but steeped in and ultimately surrendered to.

Laurence Olivier gives the textbook course on Shakespearean villainy as crown-stealing schemer Richard. Considered by many to be Olivier's best take on the Bard. [22 Feb 2004]

This is an instant classic, primal and immediate in its depiction of the death of a parent, firmly anchored in the Disney style while extending its boundaries with arresting new perspectives and a tough-mindedness simply not possible to its most obvious ancestors, Bambi and The Jungle Book. [24 June 1994, p.47]

The Little Mermaid is more than Disney Lite, as so many of the studio's animations of the last couple of decades have been. It offers a strong link to the classic Disney tradition while generating freshly hatched delights. And it puts Disney back in the animation game in a big way. [17 Nov 1989, p.85p]

Wiseman has made something so mundane as to be absorbingly exotic, a civics-lesson procedural. As with any procedural, the people involved in the process are just as important to the story as the process is.

It’s a work of cruel comic genius, in some ways even crueler than “No Country for Old Men.’’

Richly provocative entertainment, as heady as a cocktail party with the Manhattan literati and as vaguely troubling as the morning after.

Buscemi is magnificent, but all the players rise to the occasion; you may especially cherish Rupert Friend (“Homeland”) as Stalin’s demented alcoholic son Vasily and Olga Kurylenko (“Quantum of Solace”) as pianist Maria Yudina, the film’s elegant and only note of genuine conscience.

In the tradition of ethnographic dramas from "Nanook of the North" to "The Fast Runner," Tulpan drops us in the middle of a godforsaken nowhere and marvels at the people who live there.

Hard Truths is a definitive work in Leigh’s canon.

The government, even under the new, more moderate leadership of President Hassan Rouhani, has reason for concern. Unlike Rasoulof and Panahi’s previous, more metaphorical films, this one confronts its subject head-on with unflinching candor.

Mostly people talk. Lovely to look at, In Transit is even better to listen to. The documentary tells us straightaway that what we hear matters just as much as what we see.

The script is pungent and profanely funny while remaining rooted in strong and serious emotions.

It's the only film that exists of the Ghetto, and it's both revelatory and profoundly suspect.

Cinematic rarity — a genuinely philosophical film.

What does it add up to? What’s it all about, Wes? In a word: evanescence.

This is a gorgeous movie to look at, to listen to, and to experience on an emotional level.

Such miserable people; why should we care? Maybe because Ceylan does. By staging this petulant misery in a snow-filled world of melancholy, unearthly beauty, he underscores their tragedy.

The latest update, directed by Cooper and built on the sturdy bones of William Wellman’s and Robert Carson’s 1937 script, has heart, soul, and sinew. Above all, it has Lady Gaga, both before and after her character’s transformation from an outer-borough duckling into a superstar swan.

Citzenfour is prosaic in its presentation and profoundly chilling in its details, and if you think Snowden is a traitor, you should probably see it. If you think he’s a hero, you should probably see it. If you haven’t made up your mind — well, you get the idea.

Cantet's script and direction are flawless, and, matched step-for-step by Jocelyn Pook's mournful score, he builds the tension to near unbearable levels.

With a tranquil fearlessness, it goes beyond the death of memory, to see what might be found in the unexplored country beyond. The answer is both frightening and comforting: More love. Unspecified love. Universal love.

Hamilton stands as a reminder of how hard it is to get a democracy right, and how necessary it is to keep trying, as long as it takes.

Mafioso is the missing link in the mob movie arc.

Formally, the movie's a lasting pleasure: Reed's incisive direction; Greene's easy yet weighted dialogue; the farseeing deep-focus photography of Georges Perinal; Vincent Korda's luxuriant sets.

As Anthony, a blustery London widower whose grip on reality slowly comes unglued over the course of the film, Hopkins does it again. This is a magnificent and harrowing performance: A lion in winter slowly coming to ground.

Writer-director Maoz is best known for his 2009 film “Lebanon,” based partly on his own experiences as a tank gunner during the 1982 Lebanon War. Like that film, Foxtrot brings a coolly critical, occasionally surrealist eye on the assumption that Israel’s military efforts have made for a better, wiser people.

The result is a masterpiece of investigative nonfiction moviemaking - a scathing, outrageous, depressing, comical, horrifying report on what and who brought on the crisis.

There's nothing paltry about its poultry.

The director's cut has been getting a much warmer critical reception than the original release, but not necessarily because it's significantly better.

The movie isn't badly done, just overdone - a cozy art-house crowd-pleaser coasting on the expectations of its genre.

The heroine of a woman’s picture is almost always a victim, a practitioner of redemption through suffering. Janis is no victim, and Cruz’s performance makes that very plain. In revisiting the genre, Almodóvar, with Cruz’s help, is also subverting it.

The dialogue is terse and funny while hinting at much larger matters, such as the way poverty can be handed from generation to generation like a bad gene or a disease.

On the most basic level the new film is pure vaudeville: a loopy flyaway fantasy that's hysterically funny if only to keep the darkness at bay.

Through it all, Bella claims center stage; and whether she’s acting as an innocent or a sophisticate, Stone has no problem anchoring the chaos.

For such a small place (officially a city, Sidney sure feels like a town), it's strikingly diverse.

Tootsie, the story of a man who liberates himself by masquerading as a woman, is the funniest, most revealing comedy since "Annie Hall." [17 Dec 1982]

As full of joy as pain, it's a perspective we need to see more often.

There is not only artistry in the development of the story - there is beauty, sympathy and emotional appeal in almost every scene.

Braga has hardly stopped working since, on either continent, but Aquarius is a comeback, a homecoming, and a character film in which both the heroine and the actress playing her are characters of the first order.

The best mainstream film since "E.T.," is an uplifting reminder that Hollywood can still produce truly great entertainment...The plot is so exquisitely developed that divulging anything beyond the basic outline might diminish the joyous surprises that await an audience thirsting for originality in a reactionary medium. [03 July 1985, p.57]

Everything you could want in a sequel. It satisfyingly regenerates the characters and qualities that made the first film so popular. And then it moves them forward into newer, fresher, more elaborate, more involving territory.

No, Black Panther isn’t the greatest movie ever made. It’s probably not even the greatest superhero movie ever made. But it’s very, very good — in its best scenes, exhilarating.

The Human Voice is a banquet disguised as a light lunch, heady with flavors; you come away blissfully sated and hungry for more.

Crowley and his creative team — cinematographer Yves Bélanger, designer François Séguin, composer Michael Brook, costume designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux — build a cinematic snow-globe of nostalgia, a portrait of two worlds that aches with family lost and freedoms found. It is a beautiful film to experience.

Spare and elegant and harrowing, it's an ode to childhood trust being stretched until it snaps.

Nobody makes films as sympathetic to struggling working-class types as Mike Leigh, and nobody makes them as uncondescendingly. Although uneven, Leigh's latest, Life Is Sweet, is a honey of a film, one of the few to feel good about in this dismal year. [22 Nov. 1991, p.35]

The miracle is that 'The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is better: tighter, smarter, funnier.

The arrival of closing credits feels like a trap door. The film is over, and, suddenly, we have to leave these people. The directors make no guarantee for their futures, but the strength of their filmmaking inspires you to hope for the best.

This is a movie whose power comes from the alignment both of Mija's discovery with ours and of a tremendous writer and director with his star.

Baldwin knew that hope is the engine that takes us to the future, to a changed and better day, and whether that hope is embodied in action, in expression, or in a child is immaterial. If Beale Street Could Talk is a stained-glass window looking out onto what could still be.

Birdman finds Iñárritu in the mood for play, and with a mighty cast that fields every pitch he throws.

[The novel's] themes have never not been fresh and they gleam here under the sympathetic and enlivening touch of Armstrong and her cast, who move through the events with sunny assurance and complete immersion in character. [21 Dec 1994]

This is a modest marvel of grace and framing that unfolds with the patience of a cloud and is driven more by wonder than pure emotion. It doesn't have the exuberance of Francois Truffaut 's "Small Change." Instead, it's that movie's antonym, yet just as wondrous.

In addition to its other strengths — serving as a reminder of the kind of small, satisfying movie they don’t make anymore, showcasing the depths of Melissa McCarthy’s talents — Can You Ever Forgive Me? celebrates a hardy but endangered species: the Nasty New Yorker. It’s been a while since I’ve enjoyed spending so much time with someone so unpleasant.

His film aspires to a poetry about barbarism that will not let us forget.

Laugh if you want at Imitation of Life or any of Sirk’s primal cinematic operas. Although if you can laugh at the film’s end, when Mahalia Jackson herself sings “Trouble of the World,” I can’t help you. Just understand that when you laugh, you’re really laughing at yourself, and you’re laughing to keep from crying.

Just to remind us that he’s Almodóvar — and to make it up to us that Serrano looks so implausibly different from Cruz — the movie ends with a bravura, meta-movie flourish that’s at once dazzling and matter of fact. It’s one more example here of Almodóvar’s ability to take pairs — not just people, but concepts (like, say, present and past, or pain and glory) — and happily join them.

Who most of these exquisitely costumed people are I have no idea, but they brush past the camera in such rapids of jubilation it's a wonder they don't knock the thing over. I watched most of the film exhilarated, but depressed that I'm not a big Russophile.

Both a staggering realist thriller and a jeremiad.

Familiar Touch accomplishes a lot in just around 90 minutes. By no means should you expect a wallow in misery. Like its protagonist, the film refuses to go gentle into that good night. Its defiance is tempered with dignity and grace.

Nothing momentous happens here, but Philibert has a magical sense of how to find the simple poetry lurking in the universal routine of being a kid. A lot of the film's lyricism is extracurricular.